Load balancers can be a critical piece of network infrastructure that can distribute a set of requests over a set of servers capable of processing the requests. Conventional load balancers can include pairs of devices, each of which is specialized hardware. Because of this use of specialized hardware, conventional load balancers tend to cost a lot of money. Another drawback is that they use a scale-up strategy: a single pair of load balancers can handle a number of concurrent requests limited by the capacity of the hardware. More powerful load balancers containing hardware with more capacity are purchased to handle additional requests. Direct Server Return (DSR) optimization can be useful with respect to mitigating traffic bottlenecks in a network. However, a drawback of conventional load balancers is that this technique is typically limited to a single virtual local area network (VLAN) of the network.